Hi All,
I read in these posts about the GUI client and The CLI client. I don't know which is which, but in my task manager I have both running.
This morning my Athalon Computer was hung again and I was looking for another way of getting it restarted. I may have screwed up all my completed WU's
(208) by opening "Boinc_Cli.exe" A black screen came up and listed all my WU's and next to each one said "unrecoverable error 144"
I closed the box and restarted Boinc and all the WU's are still "ready to report" so I hope all is well and they get reported when the schedualer comes back online.
I tried restarting Boinc, I restarted the computer, and the Wu stayed hung. The only way I found to get it started again was to reinstall 4.05. As soon as this was done, the Wu jumped back to where it had started from, and has been running ever since.
I have also noticed that when I restart the computer when a WU is hung, the Gui client is in the task manager however the CLI client is not.

Happy Labor Day To All, And Lets Have A Better Tomorrow!!

Warms Regards,

Rocky

I don't think both should run at the same time - perhabs that's why it hangs.


S@h Berkeley's Staff Friends Club © member

Hi Bruno,
Thank you for responding! :-) I don't know. Right now in my Task Manager Boinc_Cli.exe is running at 91-97%
Boinc_gui.exe, is running at 0% but it shows on the Task Manager as a open program. But when it hangs on A Wu the Boinc_Cli.exe Disappears leaving only the Boinc_Gui. This is confusing to me, I hope I am not confusing you by my words.

Regards,

Rocky

Running both gui & cli from the same directory at the same time is a bad idea, since both will use the same client_state.xml-file and try running the same wu. Since this will not work, the current wu will be marked as error, and try emptying the slots-directory and this again will fail so all wu will error-out...

Not sure if BOINC is re-reading the state-file during execution, or just writes from info in memory. If only writes from memory the 1st client will probabily happily continue crunching but the 2nd client should try reporting all the errored-out results and if this succeeds you can't return them later either since the servers only accepts the same result once...

The cli will at startup lock a file, so 2 cli-instances can't run in the same directory. But unfortunately the gui doesn't write any lock-file and therefore you can run both gui & cli at the same time... and risk making a mess.

It does not look normal to me running both at the same time. Either you run the GUI or the CLI. You Probably have installed the CLI and GUI is launching at boot with windows. In the task manager you should see BOINC and SETI running and that's it. If you want to run CLI be sure to remove BOINC from startup item.

That's all I can think of.

Good luck
Marc

> Hi Bruno,
> Thank you for responding! :-) I don't know. Right now in my Task Manager
> Boinc_Cli.exe is running at 91-97%
> Boinc_gui.exe, is running at 0% but it shows on the Task Manager as a open
> program. But when it hangs on A Wu the Boinc_Cli.exe Disappears leaving only
> the Boinc_Gui. This is confusing to me, I hope I am not confusing you by my
> words.

I'm not getting confused by your words ;-) It seems the two are conflicting, as mentioned by others too. When something goes wrong it seems the CLI exits and as the GUI didn't actually crunch anything it looks like it is the one that hangs. I'm onl guessing, but one things for sure, I totally agree with Petit Soleil and Ingleside. Running both is asking for problems ;-)

I don't know how the two are started on your computer, but make sure that only the one you want is running.


S@h Berkeley's Staff Friends Club © member

Hi All,
Thanks for all your comments, but I think I have confused myself. What is open in my task manager is as follows.

Boinc_gui.exe
setathome_4.03_windows_intelx86.exe.

Boic Gui operates in the task manager at 0-2%

setiathome operates between 88-97%

When a WU hangs the "Setiathome" disappears leavuing the Boinc GUI.

Does this make more sense. I apologize, I am just trying to fix this ***** thing.
Thanks to all for all your help. I just want to make sure I am operating the way it is supposed to work.

Anyway can someone tell me the difference between CLI and Gui.
I would appreciate it.


Warm Regards,

Rcoky

> Hi All,
> Thanks for all your comments, but I think I have confused myself. What is
> open in my task manager is as follows.
>
> Boinc_gui.exe
> setathome_4.03_windows_intelx86.exe.
>
> Boic Gui operates in the task manager at 0-2%
>
> setiathome operates between 88-97%
>
> When a WU hangs the "Setiathome" disappears leavuing the Boinc GUI.
>
> Does this make more sense. I apologize, I am just trying to fix this *****
> thing.
> Thanks to all for all your help. I just want to make sure I am operating the
> way it is supposed to work.
>
> Anyway can someone tell me the difference between CLI and Gui.
> I would appreciate it.
>
>
> Warm Regards,
>
> Rcoky
>

Some of us are have the same problem see threads

http://setiweb.ssl.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=3303

and

http://setiweb.ssl.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=3772

I know mine is the same as yours "When a WU hangs the "Setiathome" disappears leaving the Boinc GUI." Are you using XP Home SP2? Thats what several of us having problems are using. My XP Pro SP2 machines do not have this problem. I'm thinking it may be OS specific? Might not be though you just never know with puters!

Hi Tony,
I am using XP but I uninstalled SP2 because it was causing to many other problems. Since the schedualer has not been up, the computers that show on my account still show I have SP2. The box I have that runs ME has not had a problem since Rom's fixes. And Only one of my other boxes has WUWu's I don't know if this problem will be on both when I reattach to seti Tomorrow. I am running CPDN on that box and it is running without problems.

Regards,

Rocky

> Hi Tony,
> I am using XP but I uninstalled SP2 because it was causing to many other
> problems. Since the schedualer has not been up, the computers that show on my
> account still show I have SP2. The box I have that runs ME has not had a
> problem since Rom's fixes. And Only one of my other boxes has WUWu's I don't
> know if this problem will be on both when I reattach to seti Tomorrow. I am
> running CPDN on that box and it is running without problems.
>
> Regards,
>
> Rocky
>

I am just a dumb old dude who knows a little about a lot and not very much about anything, plus I do not run CLI.....;o)
P4 3.0 512cache
P4 1.8 512cache
Gainward FX5900u
Visiontek gf4 4600
160 gig ata 100
20 gig ata 133
Dx9b
1gig pc3200
1gig pc2100
on dsl
XP pro
BOINC Ver 4.05

M7 Seti@h Berkeley's Staff Friends Club ©

Hi All

As far as I understand it (which is probably not at all) the GUI (graphical user interface) uses calls into the windows operating system for its display and links for generating the screen saver.

The CLI (command line interpreter) version runs in the equivalent of a DOS box and has no calls into windows.

As calls to windows tend to slow down the processing a CLI version of the software will run significantly faster than the GUI version.

From experience windows will take somewhere between 20-40% longer to process the same information.

Also, you should not run both the GUI and CLI versions as they will be trying to process the same workunits.

If the above is correct I hope this is of some help

Regards

Nick


S@h Berkeley's Staff Friends Club ©

As long as you're not constantly looking on the "pretty graphics" of the screen-saver, or constantly looks on the disk-pie-chart, the BOINC-gui will use virtually no cpu-power just like the cli.

Also, since the actual crunching is done by a separate process, this will take the same cpu-time regardless of gui or cli.

The only real advantage of the BOINC-cli is it can be installed as a service, and therefore will run even then no-one is logged in, and is hidden from normal users so they can't stop BOINC. :)

The gui is currently easier to use then connecting to new projects or to control by example pausing net-transfers, so since there isn't a performance-penalty to use the gui it's really only a choise if you wants to run as service or not.

And as already mentioned, don't run the gui & the cli at the same time...

Ingleside

Sounds OK to me - I don't disagree with anything you say.

When the system stabilises I will run some caparisons between the GUI and the CLI versions and report back

Nick


S@h Berkeley's Staff Friends Club ©

I am using 98SE and have the same problem...but mine seems to hang when BOINC is not able to connect to server to report or get new WUs. I have BOINC set to not disable network activity, but when I restart the computer network activity is turned on by default. Since it seems to happen on XP SP2 and 98SE, I don't think it is OS specific.

>
> I know mine is the same as yours "When a WU hangs the "Setiathome" disappears
> leaving the Boinc GUI." Are you using XP Home SP2? Thats what several of us
> having problems are using. My XP Pro SP2 machines do not have this problem.
> I'm thinking it may be OS specific? Might not be though you just never know
> with puters!
>
>

PS to previous message

Using the CLI version it is not possible to easily monitor the progress of workunits without the use of a piece of 3rd party software.
BionicView seems to implement this reasonable well.

Going back to S@H Classic it was possible to use a piece of software such as SetiHide or SetiLog to do this for you.

On advantage of using SetiHide was it would also allow the use of a central workunit pool which all the PCs running Seti could utilise.

Having a central pool and monitoring software it allowed a monitorable use of the CLI client. Using the CLI version cut about 25% off the processing time of a workunit.

Having said this all the crunching (not the communications or transfer) of a workunit was contained within 1 process and not spread across various processes.

Whether this will affect the processing time with BOINC I don't yet know but will find out.

I agree with Ingleside, the graphics are very pretty but do I really need or want them, and I can tell how much space is being used via other means?


S@h Berkeley's Staff Friends Club ©

Hi All,
Thank you everyone for your input. At least now I know I am running the GUI and not the CLI. (I can actually see mine running). I actually confused myself by looking at too many things. I now realize that the setiathome_4.05 is processing the WU and not the GUI client.

Thank you everybody for helping me along my learning process.

And Like I posted before, the one thing that cleared my WUWU's from hanging was to reinstall 4.05, It starts the Wu where it left off everytime. I have not had to restart my computer today, so WU's are processing properly.

Warm Regards, and lets hope for a better tomorrow!!

Rocky Cudd

Looks like this issue will be fixed in next release:

David 6 Sept 2004
- The Windows GUI and CLI versions were using different mechanisms
to ensure that only one instance of BOINC is running.
Factored this into a function check_unique_instance(),
which is used by all versions.

4.08 could well be the next ver....